December 2008

December 31, 2008

Zahid Hussain, Mathew Rosenberg and Peter Wonacott have
reported in the Wall Street Journal today that Pakistan’s own investigation has
established “substantive links” between the 10 Mumbai terror attackers and the
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Zarar Shah, a top LeT commander arrested by Pakistan, has
reportedly confessed to his group’s involvement in the attack. “He is singing,”
is how a security official quoted by the WSJ describes Shah’s confession. (I love
taking such remarks literally—imagine Zarar Shah actually singing his
confession in a police lock-up with his interrogators providing the chorus. But
I digress.)

Shah’s confession seems to bear out broadly everything that
Indian interrogators have attributed to the lone surviving attacker Mohammad
Ajmal Amir Qasab’s account of the events.

Is it still possible for Pakistan to officially deny that
the attack was planned and mounted from Pakistani soil and by a Pakistani
group? It is always possible to deny anything even in the face of undeniable
evidence. In the past couple of days there has been a clearly perceptible shift in
Pakistan’s approach to the crisis. From complete stonewalling to the disclosure
about Shah’s confession represents an extraordinary turnaround. I am curious to
know what has caused this shift and, more crucially, for what tactical purpose the
interregnum was used behind the curtain of denials.

It is a highly encouraging sign that bits and pieces are
coming out in the media suggesting that not everyone in the Pakistani
establishment is afflicted by denial. The Mumbai attacks offered Pakistan a
great opportunity to purge its security and intelligence institutions of those
sympathetic to the cause espoused by the jihadists. The only way an enduring democratic
society in Pakistan can strike roots is by sharply demarcating boundaries
between the civil society and the military with a clear definition of who is
subservient to whom.

December 30, 2008

Looking at the latest rounds of Israeli pounding from the
prism of India-Pakistan relations throws up some plausible theories.

In a sense the Israeli strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza
have significantly reduced prospects of a conflict in South Asia. While there
is no geopolitical law that prevents many conflagrations to go on
simultaneously around the world, something tells me that the sharpness of the
rhetoric between India and Pakistan has suddenly been blunted. The latest
example and perhaps the most consequential example of this are comments by
Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He has emphasized the need
to “de-escalate and avoid conflict” with India.

The fact that Kayani’s remarks came during his meeting with
visiting Chinese vice-foreign minister He Yafei give them particular weight. He
was sent by Beijing with the specific purpose of diffusing tensions between
India and Pakistan. If there is one country whose counsel Pakistan’s military
would still pay attention to it is China. There is no way Pakistan can afford
to displease its giant neighbor to its north even as it is needling another
giant neighbor to its east. Unlike India, Pakistan has no emotional baggage of
the past riding its back since 1947 in its relations with China. It is a
strictly utilitarian and guilt-free association. That distance gives Pakistan a
sense of comfort with China. Of course, Beijing has its own geostrategic
reasons to keep Pakistan in check.

Whether or not anyone explicitly acknowledges it either in
India or Pakistan the violence between Israel and Palestine is viewed as a
reminder by the two South Asian neighbors what their own future could look like
were they to persist with the level of animus and distrust that got heightened
after the Mumbai attacks. It is tempting for many hawks in India to applaud
Israel’s “no non-sense” brutality in retaliation against similar brutality from
the other side. The point to remember is that since 1967 Six-Day War we have
seen numerous such tactical military escalations but they have not resolved
anything. It is not my place to offer a solution to this conflict but it is
commonsense to say that killing people from time to time on either side does
not seem to work.

December 29, 2008

(The story has since been dimissed as "ridiculous and baseless" by President Zardari's office)

Something very oddly familiar seems to be going on in
Islamabad. The wire service IANS’s Pakistan correspondent Mohammad Najeeb
reports that President Asif Ali Zardari could well become the prime minister of
the country and install his father as the country’s president.

In doing so, the story goes, Zardari is expected to transfer
all presidential powers to the prime minister’s office by annulling the
constitutional amendments brought in by former President Pervez Musharraf to
concentrate all powers in his office. Not that Zardari distrusts his own father
Hakim Ali Zardari but you cannot be blamed for reaching that inference. However,
in Pakistan’s permanently daggers-drawn politics it is better to have your
father as your replacement than a real rival.

If Zardari carries out the plan, the country’s current Prime
Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will be obviously replaced. Going by what Najeeb
writes Zardari and Gilani do not see eye to eye and things have reached a point
where "Gilani has plainly refused to obey Zardari's orders, saying
everything would be done on merit," according to a leader of the ruling
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

Cynical deal-making is the creed of politics everywhere in
the world but in South Asia it is practiced with unvarnished greed and
ambition. Everything else, including the welfare of the country politicians
seek to rule, is incidental to their own personal power and in many cases
brazen aggrandizement. It was clear to anyone who knows Pakistan’s politics
that in the immediate aftermath of former prime minister and his wife Benazir
Bhutto’s assassination, Zardari would move quickly to capture power. He ought
to have known that his eventual objective should be to become the country’s
prime minister because that is where all the political action is. Although the
office of the president of Pakistan remains a decisive power center, Zardari is
known to be a deeply political animal who likes to be in the thick of things.

One does not know whether and when he will be able to effect
this dramatic shift (IANS says likely by March next year) but the very fact
that it has crossed Zardari’s mind shows that the issue of where he should be
is not settled.

December 28, 2008

Reasonableness has returned to Pakistan’s official response
to the question of whether Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the lone surviving Mumbai
attacker, is a Pakistani.

Islamabad now says it will provide Qasab legal assistance if
they can establish that he is indeed from Pakistan. A senior Pakistani official
has been quoted the IANS wire as saying, "Yes, we will provide him
legal aid if he's a Pakistani and we are allowed consular access to him."

It is baffling why Pakistan could not have taken this
position soon after it was disclosed by India that Qasab had sought consular
access to the Pakistani mission in New Delhi. No one is suggesting that merely
agreeing to afford him consular access is tantamount to admission that he is
Pakistani origin but it is a start. It is obviously better than whipping war
hysteria and claim to redeploy troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border.

The “information” on Qasab as Pakistan calls it and “evidence”
as India calls it was routed to Pakistan via the US. "Yes, we have
received information like the confession by Qasab and a record of his
conversation with people in Pakistan," the official said.One can smell incredulity in his expression ‘information
like the confession’. You can tell that he does not believe for a second in the
veracity of what India calls the confession.

I agree that such cases are never watertight but given that
India has also furnished phone intercepts and logs about contacts between the
terrorists and their handlers/trainers in Pakistan the case appears far more
credible than what Pakistan would like the world to believe.

This is a promising opening in the eventual resolution of
the stand-off that is causing palpitations in Western capitals. But then
India-Pakistan relations have a great history of letting hopes down.

December 27, 2008

To think that the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
(CBSO) would team up with Sonu Nigam for a concert titled Rafi Resurrected in
London and perform songs such as “Hum tumse juda hoke mar jayenge ro ro ke”
sounds absurdly improbable. That’s exactly what happened recently in London. The
1965 song was composed by the underrated Usha Khanna and written by Asad
Bhopali.

The concert to commemorate Mohammad Rafi, widely regarded as
the greatest male playback singer of India (there are equal numbers who accord
that status to Kishore Kumar but that’s that), was broadcast on Sony
television. The CBSO musicians did an exceptional job of internalizing the
spirit of the wide variety of songs that Nigam sang. The songs lend themselves so well to western
orchestration even though the mood of most was anything but.

For instance, the 1967 song ‘Patthar ke sanam tujhe humne’ composed by Laxmikant Pyarelal and written by
the always outstanding Majrooh Sultanpuri is hard to picture in a western
orchestral situation. But then there is the 1968 ‘Kaun hai jo sapnon mei aya’
from ‘Jhuk Gaya Asman’, composed by Shankar Jaikishan and written by Hasrat
Jaipuri that lends itself so well. I found the 1949 classic ‘Suhani raat dhal
chuki’ composed by the great Naushad for the movie ‘Dulari’ and written by
Shakeel Badayuni particularly arresting. Try the 1975 Punjabi number ‘Main jatt
yamla pagla’ from ‘Pratigya’ composed by Laxmikant Pyarelal and written by
Anand Bakshi. You would think it practically impossible to render that number
in a symphonic framework. Think again.

I also loved the 1963 song 'Yaad na jaye' from 'Dil ek mandir' composed by Shankar Jaikishan and written by the master Shailendra.

The showstopper has to be "Tum jo mil gaye ho' from 'Hanste Zakhm' (1973) composed by the unputdownable Madan Mohan with lyrics by the great Kaifi Azmi.

For India and Pakistan there is a moral there somewhere in the
latest Israeli strikes on Hamas targets in Gaza that killed 195 Palestinians.
That’s what the future would look like pretty soon were Pakistan to continue
its patronage of terror groups and India to launch retaliatory strikes. It is a
war without an end. People would keep dying on both sides in a perpetual cycle
of violence. For some it might satisfy their blood lust but it will never
resolve the core issues that tear apart the neighbors.

If Pakistan wants to be taken seriously as a nation-state in
control of its own destiny it has to engage in national introspection. Six
decades may not be a long time in the life of a nation but they are certainly
enough to have at least formed clearly defined contours of a civil society
which has begun to address its existential problems with maturity. On that
front and many others Pakistan has clearly failed its own people with criminal
nonchalance. No one is suggesting that India has solved its million problems.
Far from it. But at least it has shown a trajectory of progress and promise
which has given it remarkable international weight and credibility.

Rather than leveraging their civilizational affinities the
two remain trapped into a street brawl. India has significantly disengaged
itself from that bracketed context with Pakistan. Pakistan has not.

Away from Chicago’s intensely cold winter and vacationing
in the salubrious climes of his birth state of Hawaii President-elect Barack
Obama is being delivered a not-so-subtle message by Pakistan.

The reported movement of Pakistani troops from the country’s
northwest to its border with India may well be aimed at telling the incoming
president that Islamabad will make its own independent decisions. This could be
particularly triggered by Obama’s well known position that Pakistan ought to
take strong action against the Al Qaeda-Taliban combine, failing which the US
might consider doing so itself.

Raising the bugbear of an impending Indian attack is the
only way Pakistan can at least nominally justify redeploying its troops from
the northwest to the east. To that extent India’s officially stated position
that all options, including a military one, are on the table in the aftermath
of the November 26 Mumbai terror attacks in case Pakistan chooses not to act
against terrorist groups based there, may have played into this design.

As early as August, 2007 Obama had said, “If we have
actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President
Musharraf won’t act, we will.” The statement was then seen, as it is now, as a
significant departure from President George Bush’s policy of not attacking
targets inside Pakistan. In effect, Obama had said that the US would act with
or without Pakistani approval in case Islamabad did not or could not.

In some sense the troop redeployment barely three weeks
before Obama’s inauguration must be seen as Pakistan indirectly reminding him
that it still pursues policies it considers its sovereign right. Without
building up war hysteria Pakistan would have found it practically impossible to
significantly disengage its troops from the Afghan border. It was not
surprising that Islamabad seized the first opportunity that India might be
considering a military option, which has been denied by no less a person than
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself.

The timing of the Pakistani decision falls within that
peculiarly transitory period when the outgoing president no longer has the
bully pulpit and the incoming one would be reluctant to appear to be acting
before his time. Of course, back channels between Washington, Islamabad and New
Delhi must have lighted in the aftermath of the troop movement.

The redeployment has the potential of seriously undermining
the US war on terror in Afghanistan and by implication inside Pakistani border
areas in the region where both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are known to have a
free run. It is possible that some in the US might see the latest Pakistani
move as upping the ante with the specific objective of strengthening its
bargaining position vis-à-vis the incoming Obama administration.

It s not entirely clear in Washington what the extent of the
redeployment might be, although a figure of 20,000 has been heard in some media
reports. U.S. military and intelligence officials had not yet determined if
there is any truth to the reports and if so how much.

Although it is not likely to be stated in so many words by
anyone in the Obama team but between the two India is automatically expected to
be the responsible party and therefore exercise restraint. There could be a
sense in the team that New Delhi may not want to present Obama with a highly
dangerous challenge by launching surgical strikes against Pakistani targets
even before he takes office.

December 26, 2008

Gratuitous posturing is the name
of the game in Pakistan and to an extent in India these days. Reports of war
hysteria building up are coming in rapidly. Islamabad has suspended leave for
its army personnel and is planning to move some of its troops from the
Afghanistan border to the Indian border in anticipation of surgical strikes by
New Delhi.

Surgical strikes by their very
nature are surprise strikes. No intelligent country builds up a crescendo
towards such strikes. What’s the point of advertising impending strikes when
their entire purpose is to catch your target by complete surprise? But that is
putting too fine a print on the broader issue of war hysteria that Pakistan in particular
appears to have been gripped by.

This is happening in
notwithstanding Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s clear statement that no
one wants war. At some level one cannot fully blame Islamabad for reacting the
way it is because India is showing some signs of stirring up the pot, the
latest being a meeting between the prime minister and the country’s three armed
forces chiefs over their “preparedness.” It is not every day that the four men
discuss the armed forces’ preparedness unless they are trying to send a signal
to the neighbor. New Delhi is certainly letting it be known that it is deeply
unhappy at the stonewalling by Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror
attacks. The bone of contention is whether Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the lone
surviving attacker, is from Pakistan.

After making some polite and friendly
noises Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has changed his position saying, “We
will defend the country till the last drop of our blood.” A bit dramatic,
considering there are no serious signs from the Indian side yet.

All this is feeding what appears
to be a larger plan to ease up military pressure on the Taliban-Al Qaeda
combine on the Afghan border. It would be a serious mistake for India to offer
Pakistan the opportunity to do what it would otherwise find nearly impossible
to do. Without a threat of war from India, Pakistan will have no justifiable
reason to go slow on the Afghan border.

A hard-on lasting four hours or more is exactly what Afghan
warlords needed. The Washington Post’s Jobby Warrick has a terrific story today
on how the CIA is plying Afghan warlords with Viagra as an incentive to be on
America’s side.

It is hard to decide where to start on this story. The first
most obvious question is whom do these warlords call in case their erection
lasts for more than four hours? Do they call the CIA officers who supplied the
pill? Or do they just wait till it subsides whenever it does? Or do they call
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahari to brag? It is a good thing that some of
these men have four wives.

Have these warlords been warned
that there are side effects to pleasure? They are listed as headache, facial
flushing and upset stomach. I am not even going into the challenge of balancing
an upset stomach with full arousal.

Apparently the Company is careful
to ensure that Viagra is given to older warlords whose appetite might be
dwindling amid a pile of all those bazookas. They are permanently surrounded
penile symbols and often forget which is their own and which is from Russia or
America.

In a country where guns are
often a manifestation of male libido, it is a great idea to pump up warlords
with Viagra. It seems some of the warlords who received the pill performed their
tasks for the CIA much better than before. A satisfied warlord is all that we
need to resolve the Afghan problem.

December 25, 2008

Either India is lying or Pakistan is lying about the
nationality of Ajmal Amir Qasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker.There is a third possibility. He is an alien
from outer space. I am surprised that Indian investigators have not considered
that Qasab may well be a part of a grand alien invasion of Earth.

Once you accept that Qasab is not terrestrial, everything
falls into place. It is clear that Qasab has no parents. If he did, they would
have owned him up no matter where they were. Since no one has come forward one
can safely assume that he just dropped from the skies that fateful November 26
night.

Rehman Malik, the Pakistan Prime
Minister's Adviser on Interior Affairs, should be taken at his word when he says
Pakistan has “thoroughly” checked its National Database and Registration
Authority (NADRA) and found no mention of Qasab. NADRA is world famous for its
comprehensiveness and accuracy.With
that out of the way who can blame Pakistan for not providing Qasab with
consular access in India?

India should track down his galactic coordinates and summon
someone from the Federation to explain the intrusion. It is surprising that
Qasab has not been beamed back to his mother ship yet. Perhaps even the Blue
Delta QXvIC 0101 Galactic Force of the Federation has disowned him as a
renegade.

I see only one way to resolve this baffling cosmic mystery. Ask William Shatner aka Captain Kirk if he came across any entry referring
Ajmal Amir Qasab in his log on any star date.